London's best contemporary commercial art galleries

Not all contemporary art in London is just for looking at. Some of it is for buying and taking home with you, too.

Lisson Gallery
This modern, minimalist gallery is quite spooky. Its blank white walls and parquet floor lend each piece a three-dimensional frame. Plus, it’s eeriely quiet, aside from the odd looped voice recording emanating from a few of the installations. The shows are mainly solo efforts depicting challenging sculpture and video. It heavily promotes young, upcoming artists which means it’s popular with students and the alternative/media crowd. In previous decades British sculptors like Bill Woodrow and Julian Opie have exhibited, as have Turner Prize winners Richard Deacon and Anish Kapoor. The gallery is split into two separate halves on opposite sides of an indistinct road but it shouldn’t take more than half an hour to get around both camps. Their website is fairly comprehensive so it’s worth checking prior to your visit which artist is showing and whether they’re to your tastes. Sadly, the surrounding area is nothing to rave about so perhaps combine this with a visit to the Wallace Collection which is only a 5-minute taxi ride away.
+ 44(0) 20 7724 2739
www.lissongallery.com

White Cube
Trendy, audacious and often quick to spot burgeoning talent on the horizon. Tomorrow’s heroes in a 1920s setting. White Cube Hoxton Square—in tandem with sister gallery, White Cube Mason’s Yard, in St. James—has been exhibiting controversial contemporary artists, painter and sculptors since the turn of the millennium. It’s particularly well known for giving introductory solo opportunities to the Young British Artists collective which included Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the Chapman Brother, Dino and Jake. Turner prize winners Gilbert and George and Anthony Gormley have also shown installations here. This means it’s quite a fashionable hangout and the area itself is known for its colorful, edgy vibe. Many bohemian bars and eateries are sprinkled around the neighborhood. One worth noting is the Loungelover cocktail bar just a few blocks away.
+44 (0) 207 930 5373
www.whitecube.com

Victoria Miro Gallery
West End notoriety transposed to an alternative setting. When rental charges in central London rocketed, many commercial properties moved to cheaper areas whilst maintaining their distinctive output. Behold, the Victoria Miro, once resident of Mayfair, now living in a converted, yet still shabby chic, Victorian furniture factory in Hoxton. It’s a bit of a bright, airy maze inside and the vastness of the two floors can get a little disorientating. The addition of a sleek minimalist extension has added to this feeling. It was built over the neighboring Parasol Unit Foundation of Contemporary Art and can only be got at via the connecting back terrace (although the views are worth the trouble). In terms of art, for a contemporary gallery to be of any real worth these days it needs the ubiquitous ‘Turner Prize’ stamped somewhere in its blurb and the Victoria Miro does just that with winners and nominees aplenty. Although fawning over established names it also likes to represent young artists and usually has a sense of humor: a recent gay men’s club and fake toilet cubicle is one such example.
+44 (0)20 7336 8109
www.victoria-miro.com

Gagosian Gallery
A cavernous, bright space that has a reputation for delivering high quality. The catalogue of artists who’ve been previously represented at Gagosian reads like a ‘Best of’ list, so whoever is exhibiting at the time is probably well worth purchasing. Gagosian always seems to get the big guns—Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Frank Stella, the Chapman brothers, Gilbert & George, to name a mere handful—and, as such, the Gagosian brand stretches as far afield as New York, Beverly Hills, Rome and Moscow. Basically, they know their stuff. Choose the Britannia Street residence over the Mayfair gallery as it’s a lot bigger and has outstanding natural light to complement the works. The latter gallery is purely to maintain the Gagosian name in London’s West End; a show pony, if you will.
+44 (0) 20 7841 9960

www.gagosian.com

Garden Gallery (@ Osterley Park)
A neat little gallery set amongst some quite outstanding National Trust scenery. Up until the end of the 2008 season, this West London country house was home to two galleries: the Jersey and the Garden. Sadly, the former will be closing for commercial use—boo!—but the good news is that the Garden Gallery will remain open. It’s still going to be showing a broad scope of mediums so you’ll get anything from pencil portraits to photography to video installations to abstract Lithuanian oil paintings. This one-room space is so-called because of its location in the 18th-century private walled garden. Solo artists—some professional, some amateur, many local to the area—use it for about a week or two at a time. The mansion itself is neoclassical and has an enormous swath of landscaped parkland and tranquil lakes attached to it. Plus, there’s a farm shop selling produce from the mansion’s own farmlands.
+44 (0) 208 232 5050
www.nationaltrust.org.uk

Waddington Galleries
This is something of a 20th century masters hoard. Waddington Galleries covers three separate venues in the same Mayfair street—the greedy lot—the largest of which is No.11 where works are focused on the older, more established greats of the twentieth century such as Giorgio de Chirico, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, and Donald Judd. The other galleries are predominantly reserved for emerging artists, young artists and burgeoning artists from around the world. The works are based around the fields of sculpture and painting and are exhibited largely as solo shows with the odd sprinkling from their representative inventory catalogue.
+44 (0)20 7851 2200
www.waddington-galleries.com

Michael Hoppen Galleries
The world appears much more poignant when seen through a lens in black and white. That’s what Michael Hoppen Galleries in Brompton aims to achieve by dealing only in photographs. They know a thing or two about capturing images, their clients include corporate names like British Airways and Citibank, as well as consulting for the V&A and The Guggenheim. This converted warehouse is three floors high and filled to bits with vintage and contemporary works. The chronological variety is outstanding and so too is the subject matter, jumping from documentary to nudes to seascapes in the blink of an eye. There is a modicum of color photography, but it is sparse. The shows jump between mixed and solo offerings to maintain a freshness and it’s great that they don’t always favor the established photographers just because it might add value to a picture, too; although there are the occasional unexpected works by the likes of Annie Liebovitz and Hunter S. Thompson.
+44 (0) 207 352 3649
www.michaelhoppengallery.com

Hauser & Wirth
Flowing obsessions with blue (Louise Bourgeois), architecturally-inspired conceptual formations (Dan Graham) and barren landscapes etched, drawn or made from unusual materials (Michael Raedecker): it must said, Hauser & Wirth represents a wealth of diverse artists. The primary space for the solo exhibitions is an Edwardian building on the famous Piccadilly. This former bank is lined with oak panels which provide an alternative backdrop to the typical white walls so synonymous with contemporary art. In fact the walls almost lend a juxtaposing air of antiquity to the modern environment. Hauser & Wirth also has a presence on Old Bond Street where they have joined forces with the age-old experts, Colnaghi. That venue holds important annual exhibitions from 19th and 20th century artists and the Red Room is especially geared towards an old masters set-up. Note that works on the upper floors can only be viewed by appointment.
+44 (0) 207 287 2300
www.hauserwirth.com